Monday, October 15, 2007

British government still blaming everyone but themselves

It's so easy for a Leftist government to kick business as the cause of childhood obesity instead of blaming real causes -- such as the great reduction in exercise that kids now get at school due to "safety" paranoia. And if you are using totally discredited science about the importance of a low fat diet, who cares? And the identification of trans fats in particular as a cause of obesity is bizarre. Some medical research suggests that very high consumption of them may have a weak link to heart disease but linking them to obesity seems to be a completely unfounded invention of the British government themselves. But Britain's government is Leftist and what Leftist needs evidence for any of their assertions?

The food industry faces a government inquiry into its role in Britain's surging obesity and heart disease rates with ministers considering a ban on trans fats as the first decisive step. Trans fats, which are entirely artificial, have been shown to raise the risk of heart disease and might also have important roles in obesity and diabetes.

The inquiry, ordered by Alan Johnson, the health secretary, follows a series of warnings from successive health ministers that the food industry needed to improve the healthiness of its products - most of which have been ignored. Johnson said: "We know we must act. We cannot afford not to act. For the first time we are clear about the magnitude of the problem: we are facing a potential crisis on the scale of climate change and it is in everybody's interest to turn things around."

The proposed ban on trans fats is being seen as a warning shot to the food industry as well as an important measure in its own right. Trans fats are used widely by the food industry because they are up to 85% cheaper than natural fats such as butter, lard and palm oil. But researchers have repeatedly warned that they act as long-term toxins and have no benefit for consumers.

A recent report from the Food Standards Agency (FSA), which will carry out the new inquiry, said: "The trans fats found in food containing hydrogenated vegetable oil are harmful and have no known nutritional benefits. They raise the type of cholesterol in the blood that increases the risk of coronary heart disease. Some evidence suggests that the effects of these trans fats may be worse than saturated fats." However, even though such dangers have been known for nearly two decades, there is no obligation for food manufacturers to display the amount of trans fats on product labels. Johnson's decision to hold an inquiry follows cabinet discussions in which Gordon Brown made it clear that preventive healthcare was one of his top priorities. "There is high-level commitment across government," Johnson said. "We will provide the leadership, vision and sustained commitment required to help to start this cultural and societal shift."

His move follows surveys looking at the rising proportion of the population who are overweight. They show that the British tip the scales as Europe's fattest people, with 60% of adults and 30% of children overweight, defined as more than 25% of their body mass comprising fat tissue. Of these, 20% were obese, meaning their bodies were at least 30% fat. That proportion could reach 40% by 2025. Such changes could, ministers have been warned, threaten the viability of the National Health Service. It already spends between 10% and 20% of its hospital budget on obesity-related diseases such as diabetes.

Johnson's decision could mark a sea change in the government's dealings with the food industry. Until now ministers had accepted manufacturers' claims that the best approach was to educate consumers about sensible eating and let them make their own choices. Johnson seems to be moving towards the views put forward by health campaigners who say the government must take more responsibility for the nation's deteriorating dietary health. They say few people have the time or ability to read complex food labels and design healthy diets and that many such labels are misleading.

Similar changes are already afoot in America where New York last year banned the use of trans fats in city restaurants and the government compelled manufacturers to list trans fat contents on food labels. The British inquiry will consider further action on food advertising. There is already a ban on advertising foods such as crisps and chocolate during children's television programmes. This could be extended to commercial breaks in adult programmes such as The X Factor and Big Brother, which attract many younger viewers.

The Food and Drink Federation, which represents Britain's food manufacturers, accepted that Britons were eating too much saturated fat, but said the government should focus on people with the highest levels of fat intake rather than on regulating the industry. Johnson points out that the problem cannot be solved by government action alone. "There is no single solution for obesity," he said. "We will succeed only if the problem is recognised, owned and addressed at every level of society." His cabinet colleague Ed Balls, the schools secretary, will tomorrow announce measures to increase the amount of sport played by school pupils. Only 50% of schoolchildren do two hours or more of physical exercise or sport every week, well below targets set in 2004.

Information overload? Forget about it. According to a newly published survey, we can barely satisfy our hunger for the stuff - when we're out shopping, anyway. And to meet this demand, the eggheads in retail engineering have come up with the latest must-have consumer accessory - the `intelligent' supermarket trolley. Now we can find out how our food got made, what's in it, where it came from, and what it will do to us. Since when did buying groceries get so complicated?

"Shopping Choices: Attraction or Distraction?", released this week by the retail technology group EDS and the food and grocery information group IGD (1), is a mixture of opinion poll and focus group evidence that suggests that we are so disconnected from the food we eat, so mistrustful of what goes into it, and so terrified of what it might do to us, that we need a slim volume of nutritional, environmental and ethical information before we'll drop an item into our baskets. Thankfully, according to the report, the two pieces of information people want to know above all are the price and the `best before' date - we haven't gone completely doolally just yet.

Providing lots of information is easy enough on something reasonably large, like a loaf of bread or a family-size pizza. But it's a complete pain when you've got to pack it on to a small packet. That's where the intelligent trolley comes in. With a built-in barcode scanner and a screen, the trolley can tell you anything you want to know about the product before you commit to it. From the point of view of retailers, it will also handily highlight any special offers and discounts available on the aforementioned product and, if you swipe your loyalty card before you use it, the trolley could no doubt feed back lots of juicy data on your preferences. The intelligent trolley not only soothes our food fears, it helps retailers flog stuff, too. Smiles all round, then.

There's a lot of information to pack in. For example, the `traffic light' labelling system used by British food manufacturers details total fat, saturated fat, sugars, salt and calories. For each measure, there's a colour: green is `go ahead', amber is `proceed with caution', and red is `run a mile'. Then you need to be told if the stuff inside the package will set off an allergy. Is it tolerant of your intolerances?

According to the survey, we want ethical information, too: fairtrade, organic, rainforest-conserving, dolphin-friendly. Should we stick the `food miles' on there somewhere? And if we stick all this information on the packaging, will there be. too much packaging, causing more problems for the environment? It's a minefield. It's a wonder that shoppers aren't paralysed by indecision before they get past the fruit and veg.

Now that politics has been left on the shelf, it's the nitty-gritty of our individual experience that seems to feed our imaginations. What we eat has become the bread-and-butter of our personal-is-political lives. This is pretty perverse. The developed world has long since solved the problem of providing enough food to eat, and yet the question of food seems to have become even more central to political life - undeservedly so.

Food can be fuel; food can be an excuse for conversation and bonhomie; if you are so inclined, food can be a vehicle to geek out in just the same manner as people obsess about Star Trek. Thanks to the wide availability of interesting and exotic ingredients (a product, for most of the UK, of the expansion of supermarkets), we can use food to get all creative, too.

Yet today we also treat food with the same level of mistrust as an unexploded hand grenade. All that information on the packet is just to reassure that the contents of our shopping trolley aren't, in fact, a ticking timebomb of ill-health or environmental destruction. Over the last few years, the risks associated with food have become as important in assessing what we eat as the joy we might have in eating it. But food isn't a toxin. Food is highly unlikely to make your children hyperactive; there's no ADD in additives. Food won't make you sick - despite the non-stop hysteria about obesity. Food won't cost the Earth or save the planet. Placing so much importance on what we eat can only destroy the simple pleasure we experience when satisfying our hunger while tantalising our tastebuds.

We should just chill out at the chilled cabinets, feel free at the freezers and proceed at peace to the processed produce. If you want to be a food slob, or a food snob, that's your choice - or at least, it should be. Let's tell the government, the health `experts' and the green campaigners where they can shove their organic, fairtrade, five-a-day ideas. If we allow our pleasure to be ruined by their obsessions, we'll definitely be off our trolleys.

Changes to medical training introduced since 2002 have been rushed, poorly led and implemented and are unlikely even to produce very good doctors, according to a new report. Sir John Tooke, who chaired an independent inquiry set up by the Department of Health, said it had been a sorry episode from which nobody emerged with credit.

The new policy, called Modernising Medical Careers (MMC), was introduced without clear definition of what it was meant to achieve. Weak development, implementation and governance had made it worse. "Put simply, `good enough' is not good enough," Sir John writes. "Rather, in the interest of the health and wealth of the nation, we should aspire to excellence."

Problems with MMC first became apparent when the computer-based application system used for selecting doctors for higher training failed this year. The Medical Training Application Service (MTAS) had to be abandoned, and the furore about it drew attention to wider defects. The report by Sir John, who is Dean of the Peninsula College of Medicine, will make uncomfortable reading for the department, and for Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, who was the main driving force behind MMC.

Sir John refused to name those directly responsible for the debacle. "The medical profession itself was complicit in MMC, and it is hard to target any individual for responsibility," he said. The policy had failed in its key aim, which was to eliminate the "lost tribe" of senior house officers who did most of the work in NHS hospitals but were regularly denied opportunities to train to become consultants.

When MMC came in, such doctors found that they had to compete with the growing output from British medical schools and doctors from abroad allowed to work in Britain. Despite repeated warnings, the department at first ignored the problem, and its plan to introduce a policy whereby doctors' jobs only went to overseas candidates if there was not a suitable home applicant was stymied in the courts. This meant that 8,352 foreign doctors were free to apply for posts in 2007, along with 1,500 from the EU and 11,994 British citizens.

While acknowledging the "fantastic contribution" made to the NHS by foreign doctors, Sir John said it was not sensible to have a policy which allowed them to compete with doctors trained in Britain at a cost each of o200,000 to o250,000. The department moved to rectify the situation yesterday by announcing a consultation to look at proposals for managing overseas applicants in the future.

Sir John's report suggests that all those successful in getting a place in a medical school should be guaranteed a training place for the year after they graduate. At present, under MMC, this is not guaranteed - which means medical graduates cannot call themselves doctor, or even work as doctors.

He also suggests that the Postgraduate Medical Education and Training Board should be incorporated into the General Medical Council, which is already responsible for the undergraduate curriculum and for registering doctors. "The management of postgraduate training is currently hampered by unclear principles, a weak contractual base, a lack of cohesion, a fragmented structure and, in England, deficient relationships with academia and service," the report said.

Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said that it laid bare "the shameful mismanagement by the Government of junior doctors' training. Hundreds of junior doctors still need action taken to ensure those who continue to meet the necessary standards will have the training [made] available to them." Ben Bradshaw, the Health Minister, said that the Government had learnt important lessons from MMC and would consider the report fully.

More BBC deception: "The creative director of the BBC is embroiled in a new crisis over alegations that he presented the film of an American director as his own work. Alan Yentob has been accused of presenting a film about a reclusive 1960s pop star as his own when the interview was in fact conducted by Stephen Kijak, a US film-maker. Viewers who have seen the film on Scott Walker, part of Yentob's Imagine series on BBC1, claim the programme was a "shameful deception" because it left the impression that Yentob had done the interview. The BBC insists Yentob - who has said there can be "artifice without deception" - has done nothing wrong and used standard industry practice by editing Kijak out of his own film. The controversy, however, raises new questions about widespread broadcasting techniques."

There is a big new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly incorrect themes of race and IQ.

Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.

Some TERMINOLOGY for non-British readers: The British "A Level" exam is roughly equivalent to a U.S. High School diploma. Rather confusingly, you can get As, Bs or Cs in your "A Level" results. Entrance to the better universities normally requires several As in your "A Levels".

Again for American readers: A "pensioner" is a retired person living on Social Security

Consensus. Margaret Thatcher in a 1981 speech: "For me, pragmatism is not enough. Nor is that fashionable word "consensus."... To me consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects—the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner "I stand for consensus"?

For my sins I have always loved G.B. Shaw's witty comment: "No Englishman can open his mouth without causing another Englishman to despise him". But Shaw was Irish, of course.

Britain has enormous claims to fame -- most of which the Labour goverment has been doing its best to destroy. But one glory no-one can destroy is British humour. And if you don't "get" British humour, your life is a dreary desert indeed. A superb sample here

Here is a link to my favourite British political speech since WWII. It is by Nigel Farage, the Leader of the UK Independence Party. He is referring to the Fascistic decision by the EU parliament to act as if their huge new "constitution" had been approved by the voters when in fact majorities in France, Ireland and Nederland (Holland) have rejected it at the ballot box. He points out that abuse is all they have to offer when he points out the impropriety of their actions.

Farage's expression, "A complete shower" is British slang meaning a group of completely incompetent and useless failures. It originated in the British armed forces where its unabbreviated version was "A complete shower of sh*t".

Britain appears to be the first country where anti-patriotism gained strong hold. Even Friedich Engels (the co-worker with Karl Marx who died in 1895) was a furious German patriot. Much of the British elite were anti-patriotic from the early 20th century onwards, however. The "Cambridge spies" (from one of Britain's two most prestigious universities) are a good example of that. Although Cambridge appears to have been the chief nest of spies-to-be in Britain of the 30s, however, Oxford was also very Leftist. In 1933 (9th Feb.) the Oxford Union debated the motion: "This House will in no circumstances fight for King and Country". The motion was overwhelmingly carried (275 to 153).

I have an abiding fascination with the Church of England. It is the sort of fascination one might have for a once-distinguished elderly relative who has gone bad and become a slave to the bottle. But nothing I can say about the C of E (which these days seems to stand for The Church of the Environment) could surpass what the whole of English literature says of it -- which ranges from seeing it as a collection of nincompoops and incompetents to seeing it as comprised of evil hypocrites. Yet its 39 "Articles of Religion" of 1562 are an abiding and eloquent statement of Protestant faith. But I guess that 1562 is a long time ago.

Links about antisemitism in 21st century Britain here and here and here

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) could well have been thinking of modern Britain when he said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

On all my blogs, I express my view of what is important primarily by the readings that I select for posting. I do however on occasions add personal comments in italicized form at the beginning of an article.

I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the RD are still sending mailouts to my 1950s address

The kneejerk response of the Green/Left to people who challenge them is to say that the challenger is in the pay of "Big Oil", "Big Business", "Big Pharma", "Exxon-Mobil", "The Pioneer Fund" or some other entity that they see, in their childish way, as a boogeyman. So I think it might be useful for me to point out that I have NEVER received one cent from anybody by way of support for what I write. As a retired person, I live entirely on my own investments. I do not work for anybody and I am not beholden to anybody. And I have NO investments in oil companies, mining companies or "Big Pharma"

UPDATE: Despite my (statistical) aversion to mining stocks, I have recently bought a few shares in BHP -- the world's biggest miner, I gather. I run the grave risk of becoming a speaker of famous last words for saying this but I suspect that BHP is now so big as to be largely immune from the risks that plague most mining companies. I also know of no issue affecting BHP where my writings would have any relevance. The Left seem to have a visceral hatred of miners. I have never quite figured out why.

I am an army man. Although my service in the Australian army was chiefly noted for its un-notability, I DID join voluntarily in the Vietnam era, I DID reach the rank of Sergeant, and I DID volunteer for a posting in Vietnam. So I think I may be forgiven for saying something that most army men think but which most don't say because they think it is too obvious: The profession of arms is the noblest profession of all because it is the only profession where you offer to lay down your life in performing your duties. Our men fought so that people could say and think what they like but I myself always treat military men with great respect -- respect which in my view is simply their due.

Although I have been an atheist for all my adult life, I have no hesitation in saying that the single book which has influenced me most is the New Testament. And my Scripture blog will show that I know whereof I speak.

Many people hunger and thirst after righteousness. Some find it in the hatreds of the Left. Others find it in the love of Christ. I don't hunger and thirst after righteousness at all. I hunger and thirst after truth. How old-fashioned can you get?

My academic background

My full name is Dr. John Joseph RAY. I am a former university teacher aged 65 at the time of writing in 2009. I was born of Australian pioneer stock in 1943 at Innisfail in the State of Queensland in Australia. I trace my ancestry wholly to the British Isles. After an early education at Innisfail State Rural School and Cairns State High School, I taught myself for matriculation. I took my B.A. in Psychology from the University of Queensland in Brisbane. I then moved to Sydney (in New South Wales, Australia) and took my M.A. in psychology from the University of Sydney in 1969 and my Ph.D. from the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University in 1974. I first tutored in psychology at Macquarie University and then taught sociology at the University of NSW. My doctorate is in psychology but I taught mainly sociology in my 14 years as a university teacher. In High Schools I taught economics. I have taught in both traditional and "progressive" (low discipline) High Schools. Fuller biographical notes here

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